Hash War: Mystery Miner’s Empty Block Attack Makes ABC’s New Blockchain Almos...
According to various reports, the Bitcoin ABC pro-IFP chain has been under ‘attack’ for a number of consecutive days now. The mystery miner has been mining a great number of sequential blocks, but almost all of them have been empty. The miner who calls himself ‘Voluntarism.dev’ says the mining operation is a group of “old-guard miners,” and claims they can mess with the minority ABC chain for years. ** This article has been updated at 6:15 p.m. (EST) on November 28, in order to reflect recent comments from Blockchair’s founder, Nikita Zhavoronkov,....
Related News
Blocks on the Bitcoin blockchain have a maximum size of 1 MB. Proof of work difficulty is calibrated so 1 block is created every 10 minutes. It is generally accepted a miner would want to maximise the number of transactions it includes in a block as it collects the transaction fees. Logically, with the growing popularity of Bitcoin, the average block size is getting closer to its limit. In this environment, it is surprising to see a number of empty blocks being mined. An empty block is not entirely empty, it has 1 transaction : the coinbase transaction which allocates the mining reward to....
Feathercoin, the new Scrypt-based coin based on Litecoin, suffered a widespread attack over the weekend, leaving its founder scrabbling for fixes. The method for the assault was a 51-percent attack, which occurs when someone gains enough hash rate to create his or her own blockchain. This gives the attacker the ability to bring the authority of the original blockchain into question, and creates "orphan" blocks in that blockchain. It was the latest in a series of attacks against the coin, said Peter Bushnell, the UK-based founder of the altcurrency - but this one was different. "I saw this....
Empty blocks have turned into a controversial topic in the Bitcoin community over the past few months. This renewed attention on the topic has been sparked by the number of nearly-empty blocks mined by Antpool recently. An empty block is one that only contains a coinbase transaction. This may seem counterproductive, but there are incentives in place that make mining empty blocks a practical endeavor from the perspective of a miner. Why Do Miners Mine Empty Blocks? According to Bitcoin Core contributor Matt Corallo, there are three main reasons as to why empty blocks have been mined in the....
The Network and the Blockchain. The Bitcoin network is the network of computers through which Bitcoin transactions are broadcasted and which maintains the public blockchain. Sometimes, the term is used to refer to just miners (see below). The blockchain is a public list of all transactions that have ever been sent, ensuring that everyone knows which bitcoins belong to whom. All fully fledged nodes on the network keep a copy of the blockchain. A block is an individual unit of a blockchain. Each block contains the hash of the previous block (so someone passing along the blockchain can't take....
On November 15, 2020, the Bitcoin Cash blockchain experienced a network upgrade and a bifurcation of the chain as well. While the Bitcoin Cash network continued on smoothly, the ABC pro infrastructure funding plan (IFP) side of the chain had a rocky and extremely slow start. Since the 15th, the nameless ABC chain has seen 197 blocks processed to-date, as a few miners are pointing hashrate at the network keeping the new blockchain going. Just recently Bitcoin Cash (BCH) endured a network upgrade and a consensus split when the full node project Bitcoin ABC decided to keep the IFP baked into....